Agree... Russia can help, but you have to help yourself too.

In Irans case, it could have given a little to make US and Israeli claims be seen to be clearly absurd so that it can go ahead and start building the dozens of nuclear power plants it wants... if it wants a nuclear weapons it would be much easier to collect the required materials with 15-20 civilian nuclear power plants in operation.

In Syria, the Syrians need to fight the media war... they need to get video footage of "unarmed protesters" shooting at the Army and Police and release that footage. They need to reveal footage of injured or dead Police and Army personnel to counter the footage of the opposition.

The Arab league and the west demanding an end to the shooting is a bit like someone demanding the US put an end to the protesting going on in the US... if they could I am sure they would, but it really is up to the people in both cases.

Interesting footage...

Note the Yakhont has a solid rocket booster, so for the first few seconds of flight the burning rocket motor might generate some ionised particles that will be detectible on radar... many types of solid fuel rocket have materials like Aluminium to increase the heat the material burns at, which can increase thrust.

Once on its way, however the Yakhont uses a ramjet engine so there would not be any radar return signal generated by that that would show up on radar.

The first warning would be from IR sensors and they will be line of sight sensors, so as the missile comes over the horizon it will be detectible... if the appropriate sensors are on and directed in the right direction.

GarryB wrote:Once on its way, however the Yakhont uses a ramjet engine so there would not be any radar return signal generated by that that would show up on radar.

I'm not so sure about that. The exhaust plume from the J-58 turned out to be a big reflector on the A-12. Hence the idea of adding cesium to the fuel.

Well according to Wiki:

In 1990, the Air Force retired the Blackbirds, the late Ben Rich, the SR-71's co-designer and Director of Lockheed Skunk Works boasted in his book (memoir) titled "Skunk Works"pg 240: "We at the Skunk Works believed that the airplane's height and speed, as well as its pioneering stealthy composite materials applied to key areas of its wings and tail, would keep it and its crew safe, but we fortified that belief by adding a special additive, which we nicknamed "panther piss", that ionized the furnace-like gas plumes streaming from the engine exhaust. The additive caused enemy infrared detectors to break up incoherently."

The 2007 release of the OXCART document confirmed this "Panther Piss" as cesium. In that document around 1959, Johnson statesPg 4: "By this time we were working with P&W on a J58 engine. To overcome the afterburner problem of a large radar cross section return from the aft quadrant, we proposed the use of cesium additive to the fuel. This was first brought up by Mr. Ed Lovick of ADP, and its final development was passed over to P&W. It was eventually a basic part of our cross section reduction methods." and "We were able to prove by 1 January 1960 that our concept of shape, ADDITIVE, and loaded plastic parts had enough promise to warrant going forward with the project."Pg 9

Now I am not sure how you interpret that, but my take is that cesium was added to effect IR sensors by intentionally ionising the engine exhaust, which of course creates a problem because ionised air reflects radar signals so it is like turning the entire exhaust of the engines into a toxic radioactive radar reflector, so by 1st January 1960 they added plastic.

In the event the Soviets and Chinese had not problem at all tracking the SR-71 from take off to landing... adding a metal like cesium to the fuel will create an ionising effect on the engine exhaust... not solve it.

As I mentioned aluminium is commonly added to propellents and explosives to make them burn hotter and either turn HE into HEI or high explosive incendiary, or to make propellent burn hotter and therefore generate more thrust.

The aluminium particles in the air will reflect on radar at certain frequencies and the temperature, plus the metal may ionise the air in the exhaust fumes, which will also generate a radar return.

I figured it out. They added cesium to get rid of the effect of the ejector acting as a large corner reflector and blowing up the rear-hemisphere RCS. Ionizing the exhaust plume made it act like a solid tail fairing, still not spectacular but far less reflective than a pure corner reflector. This was part of the progression from A-11 (Lockheed's "you guys are stupid there's no way to reduce the RCS so we're ignoring that part" design) to A-12 (Lockheed's "well damn, you really can reduce the RCS" design). This is also why you find large fairings covering the engine nozzles in images of a lot of the RCS pole models.

If it happened to affect IR sensors, that was an added benefit and was not the point of the effort. Kinda like how the chines were actually added to reduce side-on RCS, not for aerodynamic purposes, but they had a beneficial aerodynamic effect on the design (despite what some nutcases want you to believe).

At the end of the day they did manage to get the RCS down, but the appearance of TALL KING and its new capabilities basically obliterated most of their work which was designed to overcome current-generation (at the time) blip-scan radar sets. And on more than a few flights over Vietnam or near the DPRK, there was no evidence whatsoever that anybody knew the jet was around. Of course, on other occasions, they were tracked or even fired at, so it clearly wasn't a VLO platform by any stretch of the imagination. But it did represent the first operational aircraft designed to have a reduced RCS, and a lot of the ideas did work to greater or lesser degrees. The best read on the subject is From RAINBOW to GUSTO by Paul Suhler, which is basically a history of the A-12 program from an RCS reduction standpoint.

So we are agreed that the Yakhont might have a radar visible rocket exhaust plume due to potential for aluminium in the mix, but once that has burned out and it changes to ramjet it no longer has a detectible exhaust plume.

And BTW adding Cesium to fuel is a bit like adding plutonium to fuel... cesium is really bad stuff that is absorbed into the body because it is mistaken for a different element. The result is leukemia or thyroid cancer.

The fact that it hemorrhages fuel while on the ground... well I volunteer not to work with that aircraft.

The irony is that because of its flight speed and altitude why would they care about its rear hemisphere RCS?

GarryB wrote:The irony is that because of its flight speed and altitude why would they care about its rear hemisphere RCS?

Because the original intent was always to overfly the USSR. Plus, if someone gets a good track on your heading and altitude from behind you, they can forward that information to people in front of you, people potentially operating missiles and airplanes and other explody things that could present a problem. They always figured the USSR would eventually come up with something capable of reaching the right velocity and altitude to potentially be a threat.

They always figured the USSR would eventually come up with something capable of reaching the right velocity and altitude to potentially be a threat.

That would have been the SA-5 wouldn't it?

All that effort and hazard and pollution and they seemed to have no problems tracking them from enormous distances.

GarryB wrote:That would have been the SA-5 wouldn't it?

In theory, provided they weren't operated by Libyans. In which case they proved unable to hit anything.

GarryB wrote:All that effort and hazard and pollution and they seemed to have no problems tracking them from enormous distances.

You do have to understand that a lot of the work on RCS reduction took place in the late 50's and into the early 60's. There were no serious computer modeling programs capable of giving any really valuable assistance. And those damn commies, they didn't play fair, bringing out TALL KING when they did I do have to wonder how much "stealthier" the A-12 would've been had the CIA not given up on it in 1968. The KEMPSTER system ("plasma stealth," basically) significantly reduced the forward hemisphere RCS spikes from the intakes, and would have been installed in operational airframes if they remained in service.

Stealth, before a Russian invented the maths for it, was largely guess work that proceeded on the basis of trial and error.

Build a model... check its RCS... make changes... check RCS... repeat continuously.

After maths was developed you could use computers to estimate likely rcs results, so you could test hundreds or thousands of designs a week.

Early processing power resulted in stealth aircraft following computer based flight simulators... start out simple wire frame with faceted sides with only a few hundred polygons per plane.

These days of course the processing power has increased exponentially, though they also cheat and overlay textures on the models which hides faceting and makes it look much smoother than it actually is without making the models too complex, though games like Il-2 have moving parts etc.

To be brutally honest stealth aircraft are first strike weapons and therefore are very destabilising, and I am glad they took so long to develop.

You, as an American might have felt safer, but for the rest of the world it creates a hair trigger on nuclear weapons, which means mistakes are much more likely.

GarryB wrote:Stealth, before a Russian invented the maths for it, was largely guess work that proceeded on the basis of trial and error.

Ufimtsev!

GarryB wrote:Build a model... check its RCS... make changes... check RCS... repeat continuously.

Hence the need for out of the way places to dork around with pole models. The book I mentioned goes into a lot of detail about how they went about getting the set-up to work right, like eliminating the radar return from the pole itself.

GarryB wrote:To be brutally honest stealth aircraft are first strike weapons and therefore are very destabilising, and I am glad they took so long to develop.

Ironically, one of the early reasons they wanted a low RCS for the A-12 was specifically to avoid the USSR thinking it was a fast, high-flying strike aircraft. Dunno about the logic behind that idea, but it's certainly interesting given the context.

GarryB wrote:You, as an American might have felt safer, but for the rest of the world it creates a hair trigger on nuclear weapons, which means mistakes are much more likely.

We're perfectly capable of making nuclear mistakes with non-stealthy airplanes, thankyouverymuch. Reference the B-52 incident of a few years ago... Besides, an Ohio-class SSBN was also a ridiculously stealthy first-strike weapon in theory. So was an Akula (Typhoon) operating under the polar ice cap. Did you feel the same way about those?

At any rate, happy new eyar to you, you ridiculous Kiwi

Did you feel the same way about those?

Not really the same thing... believe it or not the Soviets had lots of underwater listening systems and their radar would detect SLBMs as they launched, but the plan to have planes that can fly over the USSR without being seen could potentially mean the first warning the Soviets got that they were under attack was a toss bombing manouver that lofted a few nukes towards Moscow.

This would result in the Soviets going on alert ready to fire at the slightest warning... a bit like the crew of the Vincennes in the 1980s and we all know how wonderful that turned out.

Obviously like anything else they would have developed counters to the systems as they have now, but anything that risks defeating MAD will always make me uncomfortable... MAD works and does not rely on trust or verbal promises.

Regards, and have a better new year...